


Run Cold, Run Down

by can_it_fly



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), It's been so long since I've written anything, M/M, POV Sam Wilson, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Sam is really the star of this one, if you ever read this Mickey then this fic is for you, minor stucky really, mister Team Sam, not worth the relationship tag but I'll be good and tag it, tfw you find a near complete fic from 4 years ago and realize you want to finish it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29145690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/can_it_fly/pseuds/can_it_fly
Summary: “You can afford this, nowadays?” she asks.“Well, see, when a friend insists on reimbursing you for those three months you ran around the world with him...”“How’d that go? Did you find Barnes?”Sam sighs. “He wasn’t anywhere we looked.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Kudos: 4





	Run Cold, Run Down

**Author's Note:**

> Unlike the last few fics I've written (*glares at my genderbend AUs*) this story will have no graphic violence or sexual content. I have no idea when I wrote it, only that it comes from a time long ago when I could actually put words on a page instead of staring at blank word documents. TBF I can embroider now, and I got a dog, sooooooooo
> 
> *Throws glitter in the air and runs away*

Akron.

Barnes is in fucking Akron. After three months of searching high and low, living out of ratty motels, stamping their passports “in more countries,” Steve says, “than were even around when I signed up for the service –”

Sam gets the call from his old training instructor in the Air Force: a first lieutenant in the Marines out of Pensacola wants to talk to Cap. The First Lieutenant identifies Steve over the phone with an inside joke Steve thought died with Gabe Jones, and directs him to a civilian contractor in Dallas. Another inside joke, the Brooklyn variant on what Sam explains would nowadays be called a meme, and Dallas leads to Ithaca, NY, to Frankfurt, KY, to San Francisco.

And in San Francisco, the grandson of Rebecca Barnes looks their go-between in the eyes and tells her, simply, that his grandmother lives in Akron, Ohio. They’re given bus tickets and rubber face masks and instructions to wait for a driver in the Cincinnati Bus Terminal.

Akron. Fucking Akron.

Sam insists on clearing the block, the house, before Steve walks in and hugs Rebecca. She pulls away too quick, nervous, and the words spill out: “He knows you’re – or maybe he doesn’t, I told him I’d tell you if he didn’t start – he just gets so lost in his own head, and he won’t eat and that should help, right? He’s only skin and bones, he sleeps so much...”

“Where is he?” Steve asks, but Sam already knows he’ll be somewhere in the house. It’s second on his unspoken list of places he thought Barnes would go after escaping Hydra: Eastern Europe, or family. But Steve said he didn’t want to put the Barnes clan through the pain of asking, dredging up more pain than they were no doubt already suffering.

Rebecca points down into the floor. “I think he’s awake. He just came home from – God knows where, at least he eats better when he’s out there. He always has more guns and files when he comes back.”

“Is it his appetite? I know they had – they’d...”

Hydra used energy bars and amphetamines to control their soldier’s hunger: just enough food to keep his stomach wanting it, and just enough drugs to keep his brain from striking out impulsively to get more. Sam knows too many people, combat and not, wasting away on meth, but trying to help addicted veterans was deliberately not part of Sam’s job description back in the VA. He had a short fuse around addicts and no idea why.

But Rebecca shakes her head. “I’m a retired widow on a pension. I have trouble keeping the heat on sometimes. He says he won’t eat what I buy, but Steve, he’s so thin, his ribs stick out...”

She’s desperate – Sam can see it in her eyes. Her brother’s back from the dead and she can’t even afford the food to keep him from wasting away. He knows that look all too well from his service.

Sam reaches into his backpack and pulls out a roll of Steve’s backpay cash – $3k, from the feel of it. Rebecca doesn’t even protest like most people do, _oh I couldn’t_ ; she grabs and holds onto it like it’s the last chopper out of Vietnam. He’ll will leave her more cash before the night is done, behind her coffee maker so she won’t see it till they’re gone. He can’t bear to hear another person deny themselves what they so desperately need.

Steve murmurs something to Rebecca before walking down into the basement. Sam checks that his gun is loaded and settles into a plush chair in the small living room. It’s a cookie-cutter 50s house so everything looks small, furniture crammed into the rooms in ways that always make Sam feel claustrophobic. Maybe it’s the low ceilings.

“I know,” says Rebecca, “I hate this house too. But my husband got a good job here and we couldn’t afford anything nicer...”

“What did he do?”

Sam knows they should stay quiet and listen to the noise coming from the basement. But he and Steve have spent too long silently casing Hydra bases around the world, and talking keeps Sam’s ever-present jumpiness from surfacing.

“He worked for a construction company as a field engineer. Retired...oh, going on twenty years ago. Died after he heard about nine-eleven.”

“Most all of us at school had heart attacks when we heard.” But the near-last thing Sam wants is to start swapping where-were-you-when stories, so he says, “I didn’t think the construction industry had jobs with pensions.”

“Oh no, the pension’s mine. Although it won’t be for much longer if the governor gets his way. It’s the only reason I went into teaching. I wanted to be a librarian but Alan said _no, one of us has to have a pension_ and it couldn’t be him, now could it?”

It’s not the bitterness that surprises Sam, rather how strong her feelings still are about it.

“My dad was the same,” he tells her. “He wanted Mom to switch to part-time, spend more time with us, meanwhile he’s leaving work early to go to bars and skipping church for football games.”

She snorts an angry laugh. “Don’t I know that.”

“They almost divorced. Then he realized he was acting like _his_ dad, swore off beer and started going to all my track meets.”

Rebecca smiles, the sad tinging her voice: “Well, I’m glad it turned out for the best.”

“Yeah.”

They fade into silence and listen to the deep voices rising up from the basement. Rebecca chews her lip.

Sam offers to make dinner – it’s 8PM, after all, and getting dark – so they move into the kitchen. It’s warmer in there, clearly Rebecca’s domain instead of her dead husband’s, and he finds a surprising number of spices in her cabinets. “I experiment,” she explains. “When I can.”

They make chicken and rice, a recipe of his mom’s that Sam keeps on his phone, and trade stories. Sam learns just how gossip-soaked Akron is; Rebecca hangs on every word of Sam’s Bayou vacation stories. They laugh, share work and family stories, friends’ ridiculous meet-cutes...

Eventually they settle down at the dining room table, food steaming and untouched, and Rebecca – “Call me Becca, please, Sam.” – explains just how close Steve and Bucky were, way back when.

Becca’s stories click into place with Steve’s desperation, and the long time it took for Hydra to break Bucky – a whole five years, before they showed him newsreels of Steve’s death – and Sam realizes how badly the records show what their relationship is.

Well, _was_. Sam’s read the KGB file, in fact even had dreams that spring boarded off the awful pictures Zola took. He lies to Becca when she asks if he knows what Hydra did to her brother.

The weeping seeps up the floorboards. They listen in a hushed silence: Bucky’s sobs – it had to be him, Sam recognizes Steve’s voice murmuring around them – grow louder, into choked hyperventilation. Sam hadn’t known such a thing existed, not until his own best friend fell out of the sky and he pushed the feelings down until he got back to base.

“Steve knows what to do,” Sam assures Becca. “Mind, I’m not his therapist, but... we’ve gone over it. He knows what to do.”

Becca, half-out of her chair, sinks back down. “Okay. I guess he – I don’t know. He was always closer to Bucky than I was.”

“You’re what, a decade apart?”

“Fifteen. He was the accident, why our parents got married – well, moved up the date, anyway – and then I guess everyone forgot that women in their forties could conceive, and here I am.”

“Yeah, that was my dad too.” Sam laughs. “Something about being in your forties, I guess.”

“That’s how my youngest... we tried to, like a second honeymoon, it didn’t –”

She shakes her head. “You’re not my therapist. I’m sorry. And there’s my brother, and everything they did to him and here I’m complaining...”

“Nah, it’s fine. I like hearing people’s stories,” Sam tells her. Because really, he does enjoy these kinds of conversations, and it’s not like she’s asking him for advice. Just an ear to complain to. “And you can’t really help him the best you can if you can’t talk about your own problems, right?”

Becca flashes a smile. “Yeah, I guess. It’s just... hard, y’know? I love my kids, nieces and nephews and such, but they’re not here and how’re you supposed to complain about their uncle, their dad? And then Bucky... and my grandson, Mason, we talk sometimes about him, he helps out but...

“I think it helps him. Bucky. When I talk about my life, complain about how Alan would be. And teaching, God, sometimes I hated teaching. I have so many stories of awful students, and their _parents_. It distracts him from everything that happened – that they did to him. Made him do.”

“Yeah. That’s pretty common. I once, uh... I once had an anxiety attack in the grocery store, a week after I got back from my last tour, staring at fruit like that scene in _The Hurt Locker_ , anyway –”

“That’s a movie? The Hurt Locker?”

“Yeah, you don’t – oh, it’s great. You can get it from the library. So, anyway, I’m having a meltdown in the produce section and my sister calls – just checking in – I have her narrate what she’s doing. Washing dishes, finishing spreadsheets for her job, tying her shoes, driving to the dry cleaner’s – you get the idea. Took me twenty minutes to get up and pick the damn fruit out, but I did it.”

“Okay,” says a man from the basement stairs – Bucky, as it turns out.

Sam’s heard so much about him, seen footage and photos galore, that he didn’t realize till now that he had no idea what his voice sounded like. No one had ever recorded him speaking. His face is narrow, stretched thin, the hoodie not enough to hide how thick his left arm is against his right – but Sam expected that. His soft, scratchy voice with such a punch packed into one Brooklyn ‘okay’? Not so much.

“There’s food?”

“As much as you want,” Sam replies, and pushes a plate into his hand. Behind him Steve looks stunned, wrung out, but he takes a plate and some food as well.

Sam prods Steve and Becca into telling old stories – not for Bucky’s sake, his memories can recover or not at their own pace, but for everyone’s. The Great Poodle Search of 2013 – “I still don’t understand why she didn’t microchip the dog,” Becca says through a mouthful of rice. “Who cares if the NSA knows where your pets are? If you don’t like it that much just have someone dog-sit when you go on vacation!” – and the Great Snowball Fight of 1941 don’t feel at all anachronistic told back-to-back.

At last Bucky sets his fork down and says, “I have a list of Hydra stations I can’t handle on my own,” and it’s down to business.

Becca and Sam hang out in the living room while Steve and Bucky say goodbye in private – well, as private as you can get in the kitchen. Sam only has to lean over in his chair to see them talking, all serious and close-like. Steve turns away in a departing manner and Bucky catches him, pulls him back into a kiss.

It’s an intimate moment but Sam doesn’t feel like he’s intruding – just happy it was his contacts that got his friend to this place. Happy Steve won’t wake up panicking that his best friend is all alone, lost and confused and hungry and –

And, honestly, yeah. Happy they won’t be playing _Where In The World Is Bucky Barnes_ anymore. Okay? There, he’ll admit it. He’d like to get back to the VA now. His poor passport is one stamp away from falling apart and every time Sam watches border control handle it, he feels like he is too.

Sam hugs Becca as he leaves, and has her promise to watch _The Hurt Locker_.


End file.
